Johanna caught him in her arms. She held him until he could stand again, and let him go.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I know this will not be easy for you, Quentin. But I believe what happened today is significant. You must not give up.”
He clasped his hands behind his back to disguise their trembling. He wanted to give up. If not for the memory of Johanna’s arms about him, protecting, caring… loving…
“Was that all I did? Behave like a child?” He clenched his teeth. “Did I become… aggressive?”
The minute alterations in her scent and her stance gave her away, though she hardly moved. “Have you reason to believe that you might?” she said, her voice unnaturally quiet.
She was sidestepping his questions with more of her own. How could he explain? How, when he didn’t understand it himself? “There may have been times when I didn’t behave quite properly.”
“Times you don’t remember, because of the gaps in your memory? Yes, you told me about them in our first session, but I assumed—” She broke off and looked away, her expression bleak. “Have you experienced such gaps since you came to the Haven?”
He went cold. “Yes.”
“But you have not been drinking.”
He shook his head.
“Do you remember any occasion when you became aggressive, here or in the past?”
Until this morning, he could have answered “yes” with perfect honesty. Until this morning, he’d had only the sense of wrongness following his many binges. He’d see wariness in the eyes of strangers, sometimes fear, even hatred. That was when he knew it was time to move on.
But this morning, in town, he had remembered: the anger, the wildness, the desire to hurt those who had bullied Oscar.
“You must be honest with me, Quentin.” Her face had gone a little pale under its ruddiness.
“I’ve tried to be,” he said, choking on the half-truth. His nails bit into his palms. “Did I attempt to hurt you, or Harper?”
“No.” She wasn’t lying, but she withheld something from him, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. The only solace he could find was in her nearness; she still trusted him enough to put herself within his easy reach. He was torn between the desire to weep and to catch her up in his arms and kiss her until she was breathless.
“I would never hurt you,” he whispered. “Not you or anyone at the Haven. But there is something you must know.” He gazed off across the rows of vines, and beyond to the fields and wooded hills. “Something happened this morning, when I went into town with Oscar.”
He told her, slowly, of the incident in Silverado Springs, Oscar’s predicament, and what he had done. She listened as dispassionately as if he were reciting a list of the provisions he’d brought back from town.
“You were trying to protect Oscar,” she said after a long, charged silence. “You didn’t hurt the boy.”
“No.”
“Then it seems to me that your reaction was not unwarranted.” She spoke as if by rote, all passion quenched. “Oscar could not defend himself. It is in our desire to succor the weak and helpless that we rise above the beasts.”
Was she creating excuses for him, or had he failed to make her understand? You do a disservice to the beasts, Johanna. It is men who are the savages.
“I fear,” he said, “that I didn’t improve the Haven’s reputation in Silverado Springs.”
“That does not concern me. It will take time to make people realize that insanity or mental deficiency is neither a shame nor a sin.” She blinked several times, returning from a place inside herself, and finally looked at him.
“When you first came to us,” she said, “I thought the drinking was the cause of your illness. I was wrong.” She searched his eyes, piercing straight to the heart. “It’s the shadows that haunt you. The shadows of your past. The ones that came to life in your childhood, and followed you into India. And led you finally to us.”
Quentin felt as if she’d sifted his mind like one of the true loup-garou blood. She knew him better than he knew himself. But when had he ever really known himself?